Saturday, September 08, 2007
Marty Lederman
DANIEL KLAIDMAN
in Newsweek:
You don’t impugn the integrity of the people in the administration who were aggressively disagreeing with you and who had signed off on the legal reasoning in all of these opinions that you either withdrew or revised. Is it just a simple legal disagreement between smart lawyers, or is it your view that the positions that were being advocated by people like Addington and others were radical positions and sort of off the charts?
JACK GOLDSMITH:
You’re right; I don’t impugn the integrity of anyone. I really do believe that everyone, both me and the people I disagreed with, were acting in good faith. And it’s quite possible that I made mistakes as well. We were all acting under intense pressure in the face of blizzards of threat reports that scared everyone, the knowledge that the president would be held responsible for another attack no matter how hard we tried to prevent it. Therefore, we had to try as hard as we could. We were all faced with the same pressures and we all have are own views of the law and how to approach the legal principles. And in some sense it was a legal dispute. I obviously think that my views were right, and I have to say, that on the big issues of confrontation between me and the White House, there wasn’t a whole lot of dispute on the merits of my legal analysis. David Addington obviously thought I was wrong on things but there wasn’t push-back within the Justice Department from anyone for my legal claims, and frankly, from anyone in the intelligence community that I was aware of.
This is an important point that warrants further attention: Those who argue for virtually unilateral executive authority in modern wars, especially on issues of intelligence in the post-nuclear age, typically explain that only the Executive has the expertise, broad knowledge, and perspective that is necessary to address modern threats expeditiously and effectively, with an eye toward the long-term interests of the nation. Yet on issue after crucial issue in this Administration -- whether it be Iraq, or Al Qaeda, or Executive power, or military policy, the New Orleans levees, or science and public health, etc. -- the White House and the VP have ignored those very virtues of the Executive branch, by cutting the distrusted professionals and experts out of the loop altogether, or at least marginalizing or overruling them. When there was a virtually consensus -- such as Jack relates within DOJ and the intelligence community, or, e.g., among the JAGs -- Cheney, Addington, and ultimately the President would simply ignore it.
Goldsmith also makes another important point -- very much related to the one above -- that deserves much more serious attention:
I came away from my time in government thinking, as many people do, that there’s too much secrecy. Both too much secrecy inside the executive branch and between the executive branch and Congress. There’s obviously a trade-off and it’s hard to know when to draw the line. If issues and debates are too tightly drawn, and there’s too much secrecy, then two pathologies occur and we saw them occur in this administration. One is you don’t have the wide-range debate needed to help you avoid errors. Two is, it’s pretty well known that excessive secrecy leaves other people in the government to question what is going on when they get wind of it, and to leak it. And I don’t know what was the source or the causes of the devastating leaks of certain NSA programs. I don’t know who did it or why they did it, but the newspapers have suggested there are people disgruntled about the program.
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